--- title: Privacy notice updated: 2026-10-15 summary: What Yellowbird stores to deliver your mail, what it never keeps, and your rights over your data. --- Yellowbird is an email service. To deliver your mail we have to store it, but we keep as little else as we can, and we never sell or share your data for advertising. ## Who we are Yellowbird is run by Alexander Dempster in England, who is the controller of your personal data. To ask anything about your data, email [privacy@yellowbird.email](mailto:privacy@yellowbird.email). ## What we store - **Your account**: your username, display name and when you signed up. - **Your passkeys**: the public half of each passkey, and the name you gave it. The private half never leaves your device. - **Your backup codes**: stored only as one-way hashes, so we can check a code but not read it. - **Your mail**: the emails you send and receive, your drafts and attachments, and the names of any folders you make. - **Your aliases**: each alias, who you gave it to, its settings and its history of senders. - **Your senders**: who you've approved or blocked, and the address and date of anyone who has emailed you first, so you can email them back on a free plan. - **Your devices**: for each device with [notifications](/help/notifications) on, the address your browser gives us for delivering them and a label like "Firefox on Linux". Security alerts in your inbox, such as when a passkey is added, name the device in the same way. - **Your plan**: if you pay, the reference numbers Creem gives us for you and your subscription, and your plan's status and renewal date. - **Limits you reach**: how many times a day you hit a limit of your plan, such as a full mailbox or the daily sending limit, but not what you were sending or receiving. - **Your usage**: the size of the largest email you've received, kept after the email itself is deleted, so we can check your limits suit you. - **Your digest settings**: whether the [daily digest](/help/notifications#daily-digest) is on, the hour and time zone it arrives in, when it last arrived, and how many digests and AI summaries you got each month. - **Account notes**: whether you get product news from us, and, if we suspend your account, give you a free paid plan or change your account's limits, when and why. ## Why we use it - **To provide the service you signed up for.** Your account, passkeys, backup codes, mail, aliases, senders and plan are needed to run Yellowbird for you under our [terms](/terms). - **To keep Yellowbird secure.** We have a legitimate interest in stopping abuse, such as limiting sign-in attempts, checking that signups come from a person, fixing errors, and spotting accounts that keep hitting their limits. - **To protect your old addresses.** After you delete your account, we have a legitimate interest in keeping your username and alias addresses, so nobody else can take them over and receive mail meant for you. - **With your consent.** Notifications are sent only to devices where you turned them on, and the daily digest, with its AI summary on paid plans, only if you turned it on. You can turn either off at any time in Settings. ## How long we keep it - Mail in the trash is deleted after 30 days. - On a free plan, your oldest mail is deleted when your storage is full. - For a blocked alias, we keep only the sender, subject and date of its last 50 emails, never the content. - Your sign-in ends after 14 days without use, or after 90 days at most. Notifications for that device end with it. - Records of limits you reach are deleted after 90 days. - Error logs are kept for up to 7 days. They record what went wrong, not your IP address or what you searched for. - Everything else stays until you delete it or your account. When you delete your account, we delete all of it straight away. We keep only your username and alias addresses, so nobody else can sign up with them and receive your mail. Deleted data can stay in our backups for up to 30 days before it's gone for good. ## Cookies We use one cookie, `__Host-session`, to keep you signed in. It lasts while you use Yellowbird, and ends after 14 days without use, or after 90 days at most. We use no tracking or advertising cookies, and no analytics. ## Images and trackers Pictures in emails are blocked until you choose to load them, because senders use them to tell when you've opened an email. When you do load them, your browser fetches them from the sender directly. ## Your IP address We use your IP address to stop too many sign-ins, sign-ups and username checks. We don't store it. The one exception: when someone tries a backup code on an account, we keep the network it came from for up to two hours, to limit guessing, then delete it. ## Who processes your data - **Cloudflare** runs Yellowbird for us. It receives, stores and sends your mail on our behalf, and only as we instruct it. When you sign up, its Turnstile check looks at your browser and IP address to tell a person from a script. It tells us only whether you passed. If you turn on the daily digest on a paid plan, its Workers AI service writes the summary at the top, on Cloudflare's own hardware. It's given the sender names and addresses, subjects and previews of new mail in your inbox, how many people are waiting in Screening and their domains, and which aliases leaked. It's never given mail from people waiting in Screening or from blocked senders. - **Creem** handles payments as the merchant of record, which means it sells you the plan on our behalf. It collects your payment details and billing email under its own privacy policy. - **Your browser's push service** (for example Apple, Google or Mozilla) delivers notifications, if you turn them on. Notifications are encrypted so only your device can read them. Notifications about your mail name only the sender or alias, never the subject or message. Notifications about messages from Yellowbird itself show their subject. Cloudflare is a US company, and push services can be outside the UK and EU too, so your data may be processed outside the UK and the European Economic Area. Where it is, it's protected by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension, or by standard contractual clauses: the European Commission's clauses together with the UK Addendum, or the UK's International Data Transfer Agreement. ## When we look at your mail Your mail isn't end-to-end encrypted, so we could technically read it. We only look at its content when you explicitly ask us to, for example to help with a support request, or when a court order or warrant that's valid in England and Wales requires us to. We don't read mail to investigate abuse. The daily digest's AI summary is written automatically, and nobody at Yellowbird reads what it's given or what it writes. ## Requests from authorities If an authority asks us for your data, we'll tell you, unless the law forbids us. You're free to make the request public, and if you tell us you have, we'll confirm it's genuine to anyone who asks. Our [security page](/security) explains this and how your data is protected in more detail. ## Age You must be at least 16 to use Yellowbird. ## Your rights You can see and export your mail and aliases at any time, and delete your account in Settings. You also have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to take it with you. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time. To use any of these rights, email [privacy@yellowbird.email](mailto:privacy@yellowbird.email). If you're unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the UK's [Information Commissioner's Office](https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/), or to the data protection authority where you live or work. ## Changes We'll update the date at the top when this notice changes, and tell you about important changes before they apply.